Toy balloons



W. A. INGRAM Nov. 29, 1955 TOY BALLOONS Filed April 10 1953 Fig.1

United States Patent TOY BALLOONS William Anthony Ingram, London, England Application April 10, 1953, Serial No. 348,052

Claims priority, application Great Britain December 12, 1952 1 Claim. (Cl. 4690) This invention of improvements in toy balloons has for its object to provide a construction of the balloon neck to facilitate closing and sealing the same after inflation. The most common method of accomplishing such a closure is to tie a length of thin string or the like tightly around the neck, a procedure involving some difficulty in that it is necessary to hold the neck pinched after inflation while at the same time the string is being bound and knotted. This difiiculty is avoided to a great extent by the present invention.

According to the invention a toy ballon is made with an inflation neck having permanently secured thereto a length of string. This is preferably attached by one end to the exterior of the Wall of the neck. It will be appreciated that a string so supported as a constituent part of the balloon can very easily be manipulated by one hand to bind it around and tie it to seal off the neck. For example, with one hand pinching and temporarily sealing the neck, the other hand can grasp the (or a) free end of the string, loop it about the neck in a fairly large and free simple knot and pull taut. The string is advantageously very thin twine, and can be sufiiciently long to provide means of attachment to sticks or other articles such as the necks of a cluster of ballons, or to act as a captive string in play.

In order that the invention may be readily understood,

an embodiment will be described by way of example with the aid of the accompanying drawings in which Figure 1 is an elevation of the neck of a balloon constructed according to one form of the invention;

Figure 2 is a plan of the mouth of the balloon neck seen in Figure 1;

Figure 3 is a perspective view depicting a section on line III-1H of Figure 2.

In the drawings there is illustrated an air balloon neck 1 having a mouth with the usual rolled bead 2. A string 3 in the form of a suitable length of twine is permanently bonded by one end 4 to the neck 1 by placing such end against the neck near the mouth while the latter is on the dipping core or former, prior to curing, and then rolling the mouth of the neck together with the end 4 down the core during the usual process of forming the bead 2.

I claim:

An inflatable rubber balloon having an airtight rubber body formed with an elongated tubular neck having a mouth, a solid bead of similar material to said body surrounding the mouth of the tubular neck, and a string having an end thereof permanently embedded by rolling within a portion of the solid bead, said other end of the string hanging free from the said bead, to thereby entwine the neck and seal air within the said rubber body formed with the said neck.

References Cited in the file of this patent UNITED STATES PATENTS 671,589 Grant Apr. 9, 1901 1,357,789 McHaflie Nov. 2, 1920 1,749,680 Visscher Mar. 4, 1930 2,024,539 Schmid Dec. 17, 1935 2,323,629 Spanel July 6, 1943 FOREIGN PATENTS 21,111 Great Britain 1890 

